Two recent Storify pages provide some fascinating insight on how this group came to conceive of "gamer" as a fictional "ethnicity" with a persecution complex (from Katherine Cross), as well as on how the cultural norms of Chan-style boards drive this perplexing clash with the realms of people's real working and social lives (from A_Man_in_Black).
"The idea of 'gamers' as a minority group analogous to people of color, etc. is both absurd and offensive, but there's another way to see it — They are creating what games scholar Celia Pearce called a 'fictive ethnicity'," writes sociologist and CUNY PhD candidate Cross, citing previous academic studies of relatively-benign groups that migrated among MMOs together.
User A_Man_in_Black editorializes on the role anonymous board culture has played in the "gamer backlash" — consensus in those communities tends to be both organic and decentralized, individuality and attention-seeking is harshly censured, and he suggests some of those behavioral rules have informed and continue to drive the hostile treatment of women in their spaces.
"Chan culture considers personal reputation meaningless but collective identity sacrosanct," he posits. "Don't you DARE suggest there anything wrong with anonymity or gaming! But if some chick's reputation is ruined, oh well, who cares."
